Re: [hatari-devel] Printing Directly to a Printer

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On 10/25/20 10:01 PM, Marshall Lake wrote:
> > Just to make sure there's no confusion...
> >
> > Hatari is not a Linux distribution, or operating system. It's an 
> > emulator for old Atari hardware.
>
> Ok.  I guess I don't understand the emulator paradigm and it's 
> relationship to what it runs on.  (I run "Hatari under Linux" ... if I 
> understand the language/concept properly.)

If you've earlier used Qemu user-space emulators,
those emulate just the target CPU and system call
ABI interface.  They translate emulated OS system
calls to matching host OS system calls.

This requires emulated OS and host OS to be same,
otherwise the system calls and their results
cannot be reasonably mapped to each other. [1]


However, like system Qemu, Hatari is a *system*
emulator.  It emulates a (Atari ST, STE, TT or
Falcon) computer hardware completely for the code
running inside the emulator.


	- Eero

[1] Qemu supports nowadays also m68k CPUs.  You
can use Qemu user-space m68k version to run m68k
linux programs on x86 Linux.  That way m68k
(Linux) program can e.g. use host (x86 linux)
"lpr" program.

(M68k user-space Qemu is used e.g. by Debian m68k
maintainers to build m68k packages. Because it's
much faster and because real m68k HW doesn't
anymore have enough RAM to build all the Debian
packages.  Linking some of the larger C++
application may require several GBs of RAM.)